The woodlands of Western Port between Nyora and Grantville were surveyed with camera trapping by the Southern Brown Bandicoot Regional Recovery Group between 2021 to December 2022. This report maps the observed occurrences of selected species, generally where there are sufficient observations. Interactive maps are created. Several mammals species are mapped with a selection of the bird and reptile species. The sites surveyed with a camera trap are shown. The base map can be selected (using the layers icon on the left).
The methods used in this study follow the procedures described in a paper in The Victorian Naturalist, Nicholls et al (2018) and an unpublished report Nicholls et al (2022).
Two data tables, camera table and
record table are managed with the R package
camptrapR.
We use the Stations.new1 camera table. This has the
attributes of the Stations plus six extra appended
attributes, namely the MGA coordinates, Latitude-Longitude (GDA94
decimal degrees), and two fields that measure the difference between the
manually entered coordinates and the the coordinates derived
programatically from the GIS file.
The camtrapR record table is the Species R
data frame.
sfUse the modern package sf.
A set of maps, one for each species, is produced as a PDF maps. The maps include locality (as defined by DELWP), conservation reserves and trapping stations (black dot) and species present (red square).
There are some interactive maps, one each for a few selected species.
| Taxon | Species |
|---|---|
| Monotreme | Short-beaked Echidna |
| Marsupial | Agile Antechinus |
| Dusky Antechinus | |
| Southern Brown Bandicoot | |
| Long-nosed Bandicoot | |
| Common Wombat | |
| Koala | |
| Mountain Brushtail Possum | |
| Common Brushtail Possum | |
| Sugar Glider | |
| Common Ringtail Possum | |
| Eastern Grey Kangaroo | |
| Black Wallaby | |
| Placental | Bush Rat |
| Swamp Rat | |
| Black Rat | |
| deer | |
| Red Fox | |
| Cat | |
| Aves | Painted Button-quail |
| Bassian Thrush | |
| Eastern WhipBird | |
| Reptile | Lace Monitor |
| Blotched Blue-tongue Lizard |
mapviewUse the interactive map. At the top left, the plus/minus icons zoom. Just below is the layers icon, it drops down to offer different background maps. In the top right is the legend listing the layers. In the bottom left, the title restores the default extent to the map.
mapviewmapviewmapviewmapviewThe work was funded by the Wettenhal Environment Trust with additional contributions from South Gippsland Conservation Society and Parks Victoria West Gippsland. Skills were developed and equipment was provided by the Western Port Biosphere Reserve Foundation and its Southern Brown Bandicoot Regional Recovery Group.
The land owner and managers provided approval to survey on their land. Individuals, too many to mention individually, contributed. Colleagues, Malcolm Legg, Terry Coates and AO (Nick) Nicholls were authors to the science program that produced these results.
The open science community developed the management and reporting tools that make it possible to handle and understand the 250 000 images that are the source for these results.
Appelhans T, Detsch F, Reudenbach C, Woellauer S (2022). mapview: Interactive Viewing of Spatial Data in R. R package version 2.11.0, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=mapview.
Nicholls D.G., T.D. Coates and S.A. Ibbetson 2018. Assessment of the monitoring of ground-dwelling mammals in northern Western Port, Victoria. Victorian Naturalist 135(4): 96-107.
Nicholls D G , T Coates, M Legg, A O Nicholls. (2022). Ground-dwelling mammals in Western Port Woodlands: A camera trapping survey 2020-2022. Unpublished reprot to Wettenhall Environment Trust.
Niedballa Jürgen, Rahel Sollmann, Alexandre Courtiol, Andreas Wilting (2016). camtrapR: an R package for efficient camera trap data management. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7(12), 1457-1462.
R Core Team (2022). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/